Maestro

by John Gardner

  What his masters in Baghdad did not know was that during those years Hisham had committed a serious crime in London. Worse, he had been caught, and, worse still, it had been what they call a honeytrap.

  On a Friday towards the end of July in that burning and beautiful summer of 1983, he had gone out into the West End of London, dressed to kill, with his beard neatly trimmed and his Gucci shoes shined to such a perfection that, if he played his cards and placed his feet correctly, he could tell you the color of a girl’s underwear. In the case of Mary Delacourt it was black, but he did not find that out until later.

  They met in a very smart nightclub, much haunted in those days by younger members of the royal family and their hangers-on. The meeting seemed completely accidental and Hisham never once considered that he had been picked up. Mary Delacourt was twenty-five years old, with long blond hair that fell around her shoulders, a smooth sheen, so thick and flowing that Hisham immediately thought of some kind of gold mirror.

  She had clear skin, radiating good health, very light blue eyes, and lips that beckoned every time she spoke.

  Once they had met and begun talking, it was only a matter of time. When they left the club, it was Mary who laughingly asked him, “Your place or mine?”

  They went to her flat in the better part of Notting Hill, close by Holland Park, and made love in ways that until now Hisham had only experienced in fantasy.

  She told him that she worked in a rather dreary government office. Within a week they were inseparable, to the extent that Hisham reached a point where he even thought of marrying her. Religion would be difficult, but other men had successfully overcome that particular hurdle.

  Exactly two weeks after they had met, at four in the morning the door to her apartment was broken down and they found themselves naked and facing four police officers and two somewhat sinister men in plain clothes.

  The uniformed police drove Mary away in the back of a squad car, while Hisham was taken to a large apartment off Marylebone High Street where the two sinister men in plain clothes were joined by two more. They sat him down and played some lengthy videotapes that showed Mary and himself appearing to reinvent the sex act.

  Then came the questions: For whom was he spying? What information had Ms. Delacourt passed over to him? Who was his contact? How did he get the information out of the country?

  Hisham was bewildered and alarmed, but for most of the time he was able to keep up at least a patina of outrage. His main problem was that during his two years in Europe, which had been arranged by officers within the Leader’s council, his occupation was the covert buying of artillery. The Leader himself had told him that this was Iraq’s greatest need. Artillery and ammunition. All his trips from London to Paris and, on occasion, Switzerland had been as an agent of the Leader’s High Command, a fact that he was not about to share with the counterintelligence officers who spent days and nights interrogating him.

  Much further down the road, to the night he met Declan at The Palace Theatre, Hisham was to learn that the FFIRA wanted him to arrange for the death of one of his interrogators from back in the golden London summer of 1983. The man called Keene, who had almost been his downfall in that apartment off Marylebone High Street.

  Keene looked like an English farmer; he would recall that all his life. Keene also seemed to know more than he, Hisham, knew.

  What these men laid in front of him was the indisputable information that he was engaged in a close sexual marathon with Mary Delacourt. They also told him that the dreary government office in which Mary worked was a department of the Ministry of Defense. She had access to highly sensitive documents and they showed him several surveillance videos—taken both inside and outside the MoD—which proved beyond doubt that Ms. Mary Delacourt had been stealing them blind: removing documents by day, taking them home to be copied and returning them on the following morning.

  The one thing that had kept them from arresting her was that they could not tie down any specific country or agency to whom Ms. Delacourt was passing the many documents to which she had access. In the end, it was the man Keene who put the proposal to Hisham. What he said left Hisham in no doubt that the British knew exactly what he was up to in Europe.

  “We’re after slightly larger fish than you,” Keene had told him, leaning against an elegant marble mantelpiece. “Frankly, we’re not too happy about bringing Ms. Delacourt under the floodlights of public scrutiny. We’d rather hush up the entire matter, as I’m sure you would, also …” He left the comment hanging, with his pipe smoke, in midair.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Mmmm.” Keene gave a deep-throated chuckle. “We have pretty pictures of you and Ms. Delacourt. You’ve seen them. You know what they mean, and I’m certain that there are those in Baghdad who wouldn’t be all that pleased to know the British Security Service had such tapes. I’m suggesting that we pretend none of this happened.” He paused and Hisham knew he had signaled through his general demeanor that he was greatly relieved.

  “There is a price,” Keene had continued. “It’s a very high price for someone like yourself.”

  “If it’s reasonable …” Hisham spread his hands, a gesture of both supplication and haggling.

  “We think it’s reasonable.”

  “Well?”

  “There may come a time when we need someone who is trusted by the present Iraqi regime. If we ever do require such a person, we will call on you. When we call, it could be for a small service or possibly for something slightly more dangerous. If you refuse us, then we will blow you sky-high by releasing the tapes, and some ancillary material which will suggest that, while you were here in Europe, you engaged in a little freelance work.”

  They gave him twenty-four hours to think about it and, being no fool, Hisham decided to take the offer. After all, he considered, Iraq was on good terms with both the United States and Great Britain. He could not envisage things changing in his own lifetime, which was a very grave and stupid mistake on his part. Within days of the Intiqam team’s arrival in London, the approach was made. First, via a young woman who bumped into him as he was leaving the real estate agency that had dealt with the Clapham house. He had felt her hand near his breast pocket, and later recovered the note she had left there. It was simply a telephone number, followed by the words “Call us or we’ll call your superiors in Baghdad.” He was totally compromised, as was the entire London team. Oddly, they were not hindered from carrying out their planned acts of terrorism. Now, however, the screws were starting to be turned.

  What Hisham never knew was that, in 1983, within twelve hours of his agreeing to the proposal, Gus Keene had sat down in a restaurant near Oxford. His companion was Mary Delacourt—though, of course, that was not her true name.

  “All done, my dear,” he told her after the waiter left them with menus, saying he would give them time to make up their minds. “A very good job,” Keene said, and the young woman smiled.

  “I do assure you that the pleasure was all mine. Arabs are exceptionally good lovers. Very ingenious, innovatory, I think the word is. You cut everything off too quickly.”

  “The way things go, my dear. And I have to warn you that if you decide to freelance until we need you again, you’ll have to keep clear of Islam. As it is, we feel that you should take a year’s sabbatical—all expenses paid, of course. Where would you like to go?”

  At that time, Gus Keene was under discipline also. When the Security Service had asked for his services, they had put a couple of possible scenarios to him, then told him that, whatever, if he accepted the job, the facts should not be relayed to any other agency in the United Kingdom or the United States.

  As far as anyone knew, Gus had died with that particular piece of information. It had occurred at a time when there was a great deal of competition between the SIS and the Security Service.

  As he sat in a taxi, heading back to Clapham, Hisham began to become deeply concerned. Now they demanded warnings. How many bombs co
uld he get away with before Yussif—the intelligence team watching and working with them—began to latch on to the fact that the British were being warned?

  By the time he had left the cab and was walking the half mile to the house, Hisham had made a decision. He would play for time: call the contact with Yussif and outline the deal he had been forced to make with the Irish. Maybe they would actually have to kill one of the targets. The man who lived near the New Forest sounded ideal. Kruger. That was his name. Possibly within the week they would take out Kruger for real.

  Just as Hisham reached the house in Clapham, his first target, Herbie Kruger, miles away near Warminster, was pressing the play button on the VCR so that, with DCI Bex Olesker, he could watch the magician Claudius Damautus.

  11

  HERBIE SPRAWLED, UNDIGNIFIED, IN his chair. Bex Olesker sat straight, hands on lap, back like a ramrod, knees together. She sat like a very Victorian young lady, he thought, then turned his attention to the screen.

  The titles rolled, Claudius Damautus: Live at the Magic Circle, then the usual parade of director, cameraman, etc., etc., etc. A voice-over quietly told them that this performance was taped by a professional crew in front of an invited audience, none of whom were magicians. It was a performance only, and no camera tricks were used. Other magicians would recognize a lot of the material, but would find the routining exceptionally interesting in the hands of such a master as Claudius Damautus.

  Fade to a long shot of twenty-five or so people sitting in chairs that all but surrounded an elegant oak card table with an inlaid baize top. Low, in the background, came the sound of Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance” from Love, the Magician. Then a voice nearby said, “Ladies and gentlemen—Claudius Damautus,” and the music changed. Herbie did not know what it meant, the haunting, mysterious sound of Clannad singing Na Laethe Bhí, but it certainly built atmosphere. Then Claudius Damautus walked quietly from the right of the frame.

  He wore Levi’s, soft, soundless moccasins, a slightly bloused, white silk shirt with the sleeves rolled back halfway up his forearms. A tall, charismatic figure. It was Gus, but you would not know it. In life, the Confessor had been around six feet in height, now he was at least six and a half. In life, Gus had neatly cut dark hair thinning at the forehead; this Gus had gray-streaked hair that fell long to his shoulders and grew from slightly lower on his forehead. In life, Keene had the eyes of a hawk—could spot a movement a mile distant on a clear day; this Gus wore eyeglasses and the color of his eyes seemed to have changed.

  Only a few subtle alterations, Herbie thought, yet he would have fooled friends in the street. Apart from the clever changes, his walk was not Gus’s walk, which had always been one of long strides and a straight back. Claudius Damautus seemed to glide silently, his back stooped, just a tiny movement of the shoulders that Gus would never have made in his other life.

  For the rest of the video the camera stayed mainly on the magician, keeping him and his table in the frame, and closing in on his hands or the items he used so that every twitch of the fingers or movement of his hands was seen in close-up.

  The applause was hearty, sustained and welcoming. The audience obviously knew of, even if they had never yet seen, Damautus, who gently seated himself behind the table, smiling benignly. On the floor to his right was a deep briefcase, which he opened, removing several items and placing them on the table: a small silver dish around four inches high and obviously very old: another, deeper, circular silver dish; a small dull brass cylinder with a cork at one end, around three inches tall; and a beautiful dark blue glass-stoppered Victorian scent bottle. He caressed this bottle with one hand and lifted the stopper to show the long glass rod by which Victorian ladies would transfer scent from the bottle to the body.

  He looked up, smiled and spread his hands.

  “I’m going to let you into a secret. It’s a secret which goes back almost to the distant beginning of time.” Another smile. Even the voice was not Gus’s voice. Gus had always spoken quietly; never seemed out of sorts; forever calm and unruffled. In Damautus there was the same quiet peace, but the voice was pitched lower—a lover’s voice almost, as though he were speaking to, and gently seducing each member of his audience individually.

  “The secret concerns alchemy.” Pause, and light mysterious smile. “The historians and, particularly, the scientists will tell you that there is no such thing, yet, centuries ago, our forefathers labored over books that were—even then—ancient. They used their primitive knowledge of science, and their magic, which linked them to earth, air, water and fire. Later, it connected them to magic symbols, particularly those we now recognize as the Zodiac. They worked hard in this attempt to turn base metal into gold. It was never accomplished. Yet, in some ways, it was. Let me show you.” He held up the dull and slightly battered brass cylinder, taking out the cork, tipping it over, pointing it towards the audience to show that it was empty.

  “First, the base metal.” His right hand went to the deeper of the two dishes and rose, sprinkling a dark gray substance so that it fell, like sand in an hourglass, back into its container. “Iron filings. A good starting point for base metal. And this”—the brass cylindrical vial—“this is a vial which once, they tell me, belonged to Zosimus the Panoplite, who lived around the fourth century A.D.

  “Even by then there was a mixture said to react with any metal to form gold. It consisted mainly of salt, mercury and sulfur. It is that same mixture we sometimes hear called the Vinegar of the Sages. In my own quest for the true substance, I discovered that one ingredient was missing. To complete the mixture, one must add the tears of a twenty-one-year-old virgin—either masculine or feminine; one has to be politically correct. After a long search I found these tears and so was successful in producing a small quantity of a mixture close to the Vinegar of the Sages. Let me show you. First the base metal …” He took several pinches of the iron filings, carefully letting them trickle into the brass vial.

  “Next, a delicate mixing of the metal with the secret ingredient.” He lifted the glass stopper from the blue bottle and transferred one drop of the liquid three times, then replaced the cork on the brass vial.

  “It is well known that the Vinegar of the Sages must be used accompanied by certain words which I must keep secret.” His lips moved soundlessly as he held the vial in his right hand, placing it at various points on the table. A student of the occult would have recognized that the way he placed the vial followed the lines of the Pentagram.

  “Now, it should be done.” Damautus uncorked the vial and tipped the contents onto the shallow silver dish. Instead of iron filings, a stream of finely ground gold sandy material trickled from the vial.

  Damautus shrugged and made a petulant noise. “Not quite.” He looked up and smiled. “A little more of the mixture, I think,” he said, pouring the fine gold back into the vial.

  Now he added one more drop from the blue bottle, placed the cork back onto the vial and went through the business of soundless mumbling and moving of the vial again.

  This time, when he uncorked the vial and tipped it onto the table, three small hard golden nuggets rolled out.

  “There. Base metal into gold.”

  He waited for the scatter of applause and then picked up the three nuggets. “The real trick is to make the gold into something one can freely use. Watch.” Placing the nuggets on the palm of his hand, Damautus reached out so everyone could see that the hand held only the trio of shining pieces. He closed the fingers of his right hand, blew on it and opened the hand once more. In place of the three nuggets lay a gold piece the size of a silver dollar.

  Applause started. “Wait,” he cautioned. “There is one problem in turning base metal into gold using this method. Unhappily, the gold is unstable. Watch.” He flicked the gold coin into the air. Herbie was convinced that the coin altered as it reached its apogee, for when it fell back into Damautus’s palm, it had become a silver dollar.

  “You see the dangers.” Damautus clo
sed his hand into a fist again and this time turned the clenched hand, thumb upwards. Leaning forward, he allowed a thin trickle of what could have been sparkling golden sand to ran from his fist onto the shallow dish. Only then, with a smile and a sideways nod of the head, did Damautus acknowledge the applause, showing the hand completely empty.

  To Herbie, the fantastic part about what he had seen was that everything had been done in the open, with hands away from his body and the forearms naked.

  “Is marvelous, eh?” He turned to Bex Olesker.

  “Oh, it’s clever enough.” She made a sour face. “Very clever, but it’s a trick. I’d like to know how he does it.”

  “If it’s a clever trick, you do it then,” Kruger almost barked. But on the screen, Damautus, still smiling, had begun to talk again. “There are, of course, other ways of making metal into currency.” He smiled, rolling a small cube of silverlike metal onto the table. The cube was no bigger than a Monopoly die.

  “This way requires only the skill and knowledge of one equipped with the right incantations.” He covered the cube with his right hand and started a rolling motion, his hand flat against the cube. “Now see.” Lifting his hand, he revealed that the cube had become a small sphere. “The art is in making the metal into the right shape.” His hand was empty as he brought it down over the sphere, starting the rolling motion again, his lips moving as though he were concentrating on the metal under his palm. This time, when he lifted his hand, the sphere was replaced by a flat blank of silver, which he flicked into the air and caught, offering it forward for the audience’s inspection.

  “It is from blanks like this that coins are made.” Another smile. “The problem, however, is that one cannot control what kind of coin materializes.” The silver blank was dropped onto the table again, the hand shown empty and then placed over the silver disk and immediately lifted to reveal a rough, irregular-sided coin. “A silver doubloon or a groat or whatever it is,” holding the ancient coin between finger and thumb. “The real object is to get its present-day value in usable coinage.” The old coin slid back to the flat of his open hand, in full view as he closed the fingers. Almost immediately he opened them and slowly dropped four silver half-dollars onto the table.